which fretted her lavish hands. After this there came the shucking of the
corn, a negro frolic even in war years, so long as there was any corn to
shuck, and lastly the counting of the full bags of grain before the heavy
wagon was sent to the little mill beside the river. From sunrise to sunset
the girl's hands were not idle for an instant, and in the long evenings, by
the light of the home-made tallow dips, which served for candles, she would
draw out a gray yarn stocking and knit busily for the army, while she
tried, with an aching heart, to cheer her mother. Her sunny humour had made
play of a man's work as of a woman's anxiety.

Sometimes, on bright mornings, Mr. Bill would stroll over with his rod upon
his shoulder and a string of silver perch in his hand. He had grown old and
very feeble, and his angling had become a passion mightier than an army
with bayonets. He took small interest in the war--at times he seemed almost
unconscious of the suffering around him--but he enjoyed his chats with
Union officers upon the road, who occasionally capped his stories of big
sport with tales of mountain trout which they had drawn from Northern
streams. He would sit for hours motionless under the willows by the river,
and once when his house was fired, during a raid up the valley, he was
heard to remark regretfully that the messenger had "scared away his first
bite in an hour." Placid, wide-girthed, dull-faced, innocent as a child, he
sat in the midst of war dangling his line above the silver perch.

VI

THE PEACEFUL SIDE OF WAR

On a sparkling January morning, when Lee's army had gone into winter
quarters beside the Rappahannock, Dan stood in the doorway of his log hut
smoking the pipe of peace, while he watched a messmate putting up a chimney
of notched sticks across the little roadway through the pines.

"You'd better get Pinetop to daub your chinks for you," he suggested. "He
can make a mixture of wet clay and sandstone that you couldn't tell from
mortar."

"You jest wait till I git through these shoes an' I'll show you," remarked
Pinetop, from the woodpile, where he was making moccasins of untanned beef
hide laced with strips of willow. "I ain't goin' to set my bar' feet on
this frozen groun' agin, if I can help it. 'Tain't so bad in summer, but, I
d'clar it takes all the spirit out of a fight when you have to run
bar-footed over the icy stubble."

"Jack Powell lost his shoes in the battle of Fredericksburg,